Shift8/*

Thoughts on web product design, development, and marketing.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool. I think it’s often underrated and overlooked due to some of it’s UX challenges (though they are actively working on that). So I started investing more time with it. I wrote another post about tracking custom events and I’ve discovered ways to automatically track events with a short snippet of JavaScript. This tool I’m building is called Telepathic Black Panther. It’s open-source and completely free to use.

People often wonder why I love Go (#golang) so much. Aside from it being one of the coolest “new” languages out there, there’s actually more sound reasons. It scales very well and it’s not that other languages don’t, but Go scales in the sense of both technical and business concerns. Go is a really safe choice for a business to build its web application. I’ll list the reasons first and then explain a little, but it mostly revolves around the fact your web application compiles to a single executable file (or sometimes even multiple binaries).

I’ve seen some very overly complicated Google Analytics configuration in my career. I think the most complicated and labor intensive setups is when people use Google Tag Manager. It’s a “hands off” way to setup tracking in that you can have someone do it for you without access to your web site’s code base. So that’s cool…But the cool factor wears off right there. When you setup Google Analytics using the Tag Manager you have a lot of complex rules setup and these configurations get versioned.

I love web application architecture. It’s my creative outlet in the sea of code and I treat it as a form of communication and expression. In my mind I even visualize it, because my mind never wants the right side useless while I find myself buried in technical code. I think the most common web app architecture we see today is MVC (model, view, controller) or even refined as ADR (action, domain, responder) as Paul Jones notes.